Guidelines, suggestions and hints on various aspects of doing research

Conferences

• submitting abstracts to research conferences (when/how/where and what NOT to do!)
• attending conferences (how to get the most out of meetings)
  • Great tips on Surviving- and Thriving at AGU
  • Advice on attending the AGU meeting from a newcomer
  • Nature article on networking at conferences: "Hello, stranger"
  • AGU article on "Planning for Serendipity: Successfully networking at Fall Meeting (or other conferences)"
• presentations, visualizations and scientific writing
  • creating your first poster
  • creating posters (practical tips on printing, logos, etc,)
  • GSA paper on "Strategies for Creating a Conspicuous, Effective, and Memorable Poster Presentation"
  • How to design an award-winning conference poster
  • how to construct a Nature summary paragraph (links to Word document), also useful advice for abstract writing in general

Background reading

• reading scientific articles:
  • A very comprehensive hand-out (pdf) from Albion College Geology (now modified to be less experimental science focussed)
  • This page from Stanford also includes advice on how to find good articles to read
  • How to Read a Scientific Article (pdf, may expect too much note-taking, but otherwise informative)
• when you start building your library of papers/references, it may be worth investing in software to find, organize, display and cite these papers
  • one option is Papers (not free, available for PC and Mac)
  • freeware: Mendeley, a free reference manager and academic social network

Writing a thesis

• Ten simple rules for structuring papers
• Text editors used by grad students:
  • Word
  • Latex
• Collaborative writing/editing tools
  • Dropbox (to share a document, especially useful when its size is too big to attach to E-mail)
  • Overleaf (to co-write/edit a Latex based document)